As the Internet has widely spread, a browser equipped telephone (multifunction telephone) such as a screenphone has appeared for the purpose of providing easy access to the Internet even if no personal computer is available. In addition to the normal telephone functions, the screenphone typically has WWW browser and electronic mail functions, and can access a web page on the Internet while calling if two lines can be used by a single screenphone. The Working Document for the screenphone issued by the ISRF (Internet Screenphone Reference Forum) on Jun. 8, 1999 (available from “[http://]www.isrf.org” in a PDF format) states that smart cards and online software upgrade will be supported. Therefore, the screenphone is by no means functionally inferior to the personal computer as far as the Internet access is concerned.
If the screenphones as described above are used by both calling and called parties, respectively, it is possible that the parties will talk to each other while viewing the same web page. In this case, the problem is how to communicate to the other party the URL of the page that the one party is viewing. Of course, it is possible to communicate it by means of voice. However, the party to whom the URL is communicated in this manner must thereafter manually enter the URL using keys or buttons of the screenphone, which is troublesome.
To solve the above problem regarding the URL transmission, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. H11-122590 teaches a videophone or TV phone which can cause a desired page to be automatically displayed on the screen of the other party's TV phone. According to this technique, a WWW browser of one TV phone is changed in association with a WWW browser display screen of the other TV phone, and remote control for the WWW browser display screen is realized by incorporating into a WWW browser task an operation for a load HTML file command from the other party.
In addition, though not directly related to the telephone, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. H10-124461 discloses a system and method for simultaneously performing cooperative works on an HTML page (i.e. web collaboration) by two or more users on the Internet. This allows the same HTML page to be simultaneously displayed at a plurality of clients by redirecting the original browser request.
In the browser equipped telephone such as a screenphone, if a called party answers the phone in a moment, both parties could view the same web page at the same time in the manner described, for example, in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. H11-122590. However, if the called party's telephone is set to an answering mode, the caller could not communicate its URL. Although the URL may be recorded as a voice message in the answering mode, then the called party or user would have to first write down the URL recorded by voice (it would make sense to write down the URL rather than memorizing it because, as is well known in the art, a URL consists of a string of many alphanumeric characters) and then manually enter the URL for use by the browser. If it were possible to record a URL together with an associated normal voice message in a form that it could be directly passed to the browser, such a troublesome procedure would not be required.